A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 251: Chapter 251 — What We Know I

Finn noticed first, because he was the one who kept a count of where everybody was.

He got four paces toward the door before he realised only three sets of footsteps were following him, and turned round. Maeve turned when he did. Ronan stopped with his hand on the frame, and Cillian walked into the back of him.

James was standing in the middle of the dusty reception with his phone up and had not moved in some time.

He read the paragraph again before he said anything, because it did not make sense the first time and he wanted to be sure it still did not make sense the second.

"South Korea took Baldwin," he said. "The Americans took Raymond."

"We know," Cillian said.

"Their kingdoms have nothing in common. Different settlements standing, different armies left, different roads open. Every choice either of them made went a different direction from the other." He turned the phone round. "They both filed the same thing in their anomalies annex. Red light. Under the palace at Caerleon."

Nobody said anything for a second.

Maeve came back three steps. "Are you certain we saw the same thing?"

"Yes."

He did not have to work for it. It had been in the last frame of the projection the Tower showed them before any of them chose a side — after both armies had finished destroying each other outside the capital, after the monsters walked in over the top of them, a red light had come up out of the ground under the palace and spread through the foundation stones and the floors until both princes’ fallen banners glowed the colour of an open wound.

Then the Tower had run it backward, and the light had drained down into the earth and gone.

James had watched that happen and filed it under *scenery*.

Finn put his hand out for the phone and read the report himself, taking his time about it.

"Right," Maeve said. "Then one thing follows. If a Baldwin team and a Raymond team are both seeing it, us picking Raymond didn’t cause it."

"That’s not the same as the princes having nothing to do with it," Finn said, without looking up. "All it proves is the thing under Caerleon is still there whichever route you walk in on. It survives the choice. That’s different from not caring about the choice."

Cillian asked the question none of them had.

"Do any of them know what it is?"

James scrolled to the end. There was not much at the end.

"No. Nobody’s identified it. There’s no System description in either release, no analyst conclusion, nothing either bureau will stand behind. Two teams wrote down that they saw a light and neither of them knows what they were looking at."

Ronan pushed off the doorframe.

"Then it goes where every other unknown goes. We remember it, we watch for it, and we do not build one single part of a plan around a thing we can’t name." He looked at James. "You especially."

"Agreed."

James put the phone in his pocket.

The only thing that had actually changed was small, and he carried it out of the building with him. The palace in that projection was no longer a building in the background of an image he had seen four floors ago.

Something under it had gone on the list.

---

He opened his own window at the kitchen table that night, after Nyra had gone up and the house was quiet.

[NAME: JAMES GANNER]

[CLASS: NECROMANCER — LEGENDARY]

[LEVEL: 40]

[EXP: 47,675 / 63,000]

[STRENGTH: 61]

[AGILITY: 83]

[INTELLIGENCE: 150]

[ENDURANCE: 87]

[LUCK: 54]

[FREE STAT POINTS: 5]

Five points, sitting where they had been sitting since he stood over Vane’s body and closed the panel without touching them.

He had told himself he would spend them once he knew what Floor 25 was going to ask for, and he still did not know, so he thought about what had nearly killed him instead.

It had not been output. He had put a Necro Blast through a marshal’s armour at contact range and it had worked.

It had been the second and a half where he had committed to a jump, and a man who had watched him make three of them had simply stood where the fourth one ended and swung a poleaxe into the middle of it. Two thousand and forty-eight down to one thousand six hundred and eighty-two, in a moment where James had not even been fully present to see it coming.

More damage would not have changed that. Being slightly harder to remove from the board might have.

He kept the priority where the priority belonged, because he was a necromancer and everything he did ran off Intelligence, and he did what he had been doing since Floor 20 with the rest.

[FREE STAT POINTS DISTRIBUTED]

[INTELLIGENCE: 150 → 153]

[AGILITY: 83 → 84]

[ENDURANCE: 87 → 88]

[FREE STAT POINTS: 0]

[LEVEL: 40]

[EXP: 47,675 / 63,000]

[STRENGTH: 61]

[AGILITY: 84]

[INTELLIGENCE: 153]

[ENDURANCE: 88]

[LUCK: 54]

[REANIMATED SLOTS: 1/5 OCCUPIED]

[ANATHEMA — ALICE]

He scrolled down through his skills afterward, not because he expected anything new — Floor 24 had given him a level and five points and nothing else — but because it was the last quiet night before a floor and going down the list was a habit now.

Necro Blast. Summon Undead Skeleton. Corpse Explosion. Call of Souls. Death Chain. Grave Command. Grave Step. Swordsmanship. Reanimate.

And Durendal on the wall by the door, which was not a skill and had killed more things this month than half of them.

His eye stopped on Grave Step.

---

He booked the TRB training hall for the following afternoon, the same controlled arena he had used the last time he needed to break this skill open, with the same sanctioned training anchors set around it under the same supervision paperwork.

Finn stood opposite him with a pair of padded practice axes. Ronan leaned on the barrier with his arms folded, there to watch rather than to fight.

The rules took ten seconds to agree.

"I have to reach your blind side," James said. "You have to call which anchor I’m using. Out loud. Before I move."

"Before you land, or before you go?"

"Before I go. If you can only call it after I’ve arrived, that’s not a counter, that’s a reaction."

Finn rolled the padded axes over in his hands.

"Fine."

James looked at the arena. There was a skeleton standing eight meters behind Finn’s right shoulder, slightly outside his peripheral vision, on the side where his guard sat lower. It was, by every measure he had, the correct destination.

[GRAVE STEP ACTIVATED]

[MANA COST: 120]

He arrived, and the world came in half a beat late the way it always did, and Finn was already turning into the space before James’s feet had finished agreeing about which way was down.

The padded axe touched him across the ribs.

[TRAINING RESULT: DESTINATION PREDICTED]

"Right shoulder," Finn said, unnecessarily. "Sorry. Called it before you went."

James stood there and let his balance catch up and understood what had happened without needing anyone to explain it to him.

He had picked the best possible place to arrive.

Which was exactly why Finn had been standing in it.

---

They reset, and reset, and reset.

James started taking worse angles on purpose — arriving at seven o’clock instead of five, further out than he wanted, at the anchor with a wall behind it that gave him less room, because those were the ones Finn was not covering.

He started walking one skeleton slowly toward the left flank while Finn’s eyes tracked it and jumping to a different one entirely.

Twice he built the whole shape of a jump, let Finn commit to defending against it, and then simply came at him with Durendal instead and made him deal with an ordinary man with a sword.

The disorientation never went anywhere. That was the part he had to stop trying to solve. Every single successful shift still handed him that fraction of a second where the arena arrived after he did, and across the afternoon Finn put the padded axe on him nine or ten more times inside that window.

It was Ronan who said the useful thing, about an hour in, from the barrier.

"You keep trying to get faster on arrival."

"I can’t get faster on arrival."

"No. So stop buying the fight with speed and buy it with the ground." Ronan came off the rail. "Pick a destination that gives you the second. Behind something. Beside cover. Out of the swing line. Or land next to one of your own dead things and let it eat the first hit while you’re getting your feet."

James thought about a hooked spear going through a skeleton’s ribs on a riverbank instead of through his chest, because the skeleton had been standing exactly where he had put it and had not been told to move.

"That’s already worked once."

"Then stop treating it as luck."

The last dozen repetitions ran differently. James stopped asking where the perfect strike came from and started asking where he could afford to be blind for a second, and the two answers were rarely the same place.

By the end of it Finn was still calling roughly a third of them.

A third was not nothing. A third was a great deal better than all of them, and neither of them pretended one afternoon had undone what Vane had proved.

---

The rest of the week went out the door in equipment.

Ronan’s shield was past the point where anybody could pretend a repair was worth attempting. The smith took one look at the arm straps and the folded rim and the third of a face still attached to them and did not even make an offer.

He tried to sell Ronan the heaviest thing on the wall.

"It’s a war shield. Look at the boss on it. Nothing you meet on twenty-five is putting that down."

"It’s four kilos heavier than what I’ve carried since Floor 9," Ronan said. "Which means my feet are wrong on every single step for the first two hours, and I don’t have two hours."

He took a high-grade replacement built to the dimensions he already knew, same balance, same reach, with heavier reinforcement worked through the face and the rim where his last one had failed.

Then he made them set up a frame and hit him with it.

The first impact came in and he adjusted his elbow after it, which meant he had not been set right. The second one moved his rear boot four inches, which meant his stance was still calibrated for a lighter face.

The third one hit and nothing about him moved at all.

"That one," he said.

[TOWER CREDIT PAYMENT CONFIRMED]

[ITEM REPLACEMENT COMPLETE]

Cillian replaced the two conductors Floor 24 had burned out and then spent an hour arguing with the technician about the calibration.

"I don’t want everything tuned for peak discharge."

"Peak discharge is what you’re famous for."

"Peak discharge is what leaves me standing on a wall with two dead arms while something with a name walks toward my team." He tapped the bench. "Split it. Half the array tuned for sustained output. If there are four thousand men on that field I need to still be useful at the end of them, not spectacular for ninety seconds and useless afterward."

Maeve had her focus recut and the cracked mounting replaced, restocked every consumable she carried, and then did the part that took actual work, which was sitting down with her own numbers from Floors 23 and 24 and writing thresholds.

A floor below which she would not put up another barrier. A reserve she would not spend on healing anything that a person could walk with. A line under which she stopped supporting and started conserving, regardless of who was shouting.

She had reached zero on a wall while a man’s leg burned three meters away from her. She was not doing that again by accident.

Finn spent his time on the thing Floor 24 had given him.

Linebreaker worked. That was the first thing he established, against six training constructs set up as a shield line, and it worked the way the description said — the second kill hit harder than the first, and the third harder again, and by the fourth the constructs were coming apart under blows that would have staggered them a minute earlier.

The second thing he established was how easily he lost it.

He broke off the line to deal with a construct on his flank, and by the time he came back the twenty seconds had run out and every stack he had built was gone. He did it again with the same result. He tried holding stacks while repositioning and found there was no holding them, because the skill did not care about his intentions, only about whether something from that formation had died in the last twenty seconds.

"It’s not a damage skill," he told James afterward, flexing his hand. "It’s a *staying* skill. It pays me for not leaving."

"And if the fight makes you leave?"

"Then I’ve got nothing and I’ve wasted the setup." He looked at the constructs. "So it’s for the moment we’ve decided to go through something. Not for tidying up whatever comes at us."

[TOWER CREDIT PAYMENT CONFIRMED]

[CONSUMABLE PURCHASE CONFIRMED]

Money left all five accounts that week, and quite a lot of it, and nobody made a joke about the totals.

---

The full team drill happened two days before departure, and James made them start it with nothing.

"No bodies," he said. "Nothing on the field I can use. That’s how Redfield started and that’s how the last three fights have started, and there’s every chance Baldwin’s people are told to burn their own dead the same way Vane’s were."

So it began with James holding a sword.

Finn and Ronan took the front and made a space, and James fought inside that space the way any decent swordsman with a mana pool would — Durendal, a Necro Blast when something got past the line, and nothing else, because there was nothing else available to him.

Cillian was under orders not to vaporise anything, which he complained about at length.

"You want me to *underperform*."

"I want intact anchors," James said. "If you turn everything to ash I’m a man with a sword for the whole fight."

The first construct went down whole, and the drill changed.

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